Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/443

 The Year looo 433 couple of centuries later, does, as Robertson says, assert that in the year 10 10 people in many places thought in their fright that the end of the world was at hand ; but the zuhole of what he says is that '• at the neivs of the taking of Jerusalem by tlie Turks people in their fright thought the end of the world at hand" — a phrase which will hardly be taken too seriously. And, after all, the year loio was not the year lOOO. ' And Radulf Glaber — Ang/iee Ralph the Bald — on whom, above all, the tradition has been made to rest ? If anybody could know of a panic at the year lOOO, it would surely be Radulf Glaber — a superstitious and garrulous old monk, who, in a day when monas- teries were the only inns, and when his Burgundian home, on the border of three realms, was the highway for that army of pil- grims pressing ever to Cluny and to Rome, spent his life at this, that, and the other abbey, with ears wide open for every tale of prodigy, and widest for those of direful import. He believed, too, in the mystic worth of numbers, and the year loOO was precisely the theme of his chronicle : he would relate, he said, the uncommon multitude of edifying things which had come to pass in the vicinage of the thousandth year of Christ's incarnation. Yet, alas, though his pages are alive with signs and wonders in Heaven and in Earth, and though not a few of these belong to the year lOOO itself, not even Radulf knows of any fear that then the world would end. The only passage savoring of such a thought, is his portrayal of that terrible famine which fell "as there drew on the thousand and thirty-third year of the incarnate Christ, which is from the passion of the said Saviour the thousandth." There remain the preambles of the charters ; but it was easy for Dom Plaine to point out that such preambles were but copied bodily out of a formula-book, and that the particular one cited in evidence — appropinqiiaute mundi termiuo — belongs to the old collection of Mar- culf and has been demonstrably in use since the seventh century ; easy, too, to demonstrate that the formula continued in use after the year lOOO, as before. Turning then from the ruined legend, the Benedictine showed what a busy and aggressive time for Christendom was that year of alleged despair — when the wisest man of his day, Gerbert, was Pope, and the most enthusiastic, young Otto, was Emperor — when Hungary and Bohemia and the Scandinavian North were simultane- ously turning to the Christian faith, and the Spaniards with renewed vigor were forcing back their Moslem neighbors. And nowhere in ' As for the chronicle of St. Pantaleon and the Saxon annalist, cited by Robertson, the terror mentioned by them occurred a century later, at the time of the First Crusade.